Hello friends.  Remember me?  It’s your ol’ buddy, Paul Bracher.

You’re probably asking yourself, “What brings this guy back from the dead?”  Well, when a postdoc in our lab showed me what arrived in the mail, not only did I roll over in my grave, I decided to resurrect everybody’s favorite chemistry game: “What’s Wrong with this Picture?”

The following 52-page brochure arrived courtesy of Oxford University Press with the following cover.  That’s right…COVER:

Oh. My. God.  The real question is: What’s right with this picture?  Not much.  There are messed up bond angles, aryl Texas carbons, acyl Texas carbons, Rhode-Island carbons, bizzare peroxides, Texas oxygens, Texas nitrogens, and the list goes on.   

What the hell is wrong with these people and why the hell is the ACS logo on this piece of garbage?  The O.U.P. editors should be drawn and quartered, and their heads should be displayed on pikes outside of ACS headquarters in Washington.

As if the front cover didn’t offer enough entertainment, the back cover has the following unintentionally humorous statement:

xford (sic) University Press, Inc. publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education.

Hooray for excellence.  Anyway, this weekend I’ll probably post on the upcoming Nobel Prize announcement (Oct. 10th).  After that, I might go back into hibernation.  We’ll see. 

I’m still writing that introspective post, so enjoy this one instead.

When I think back on why I became a chemist, I always point to my 10th-grade chemistry class. Our teacher, Dr. Liebermann, was absolutely fabulous. He developed an engaging, rigorous two-year AP Chemistry course with great lecture notes and a detailed laboratory component. The focus was on really understanding the general principles at play, and the massive lab reports and essay questions on tests forced us to understand what was going on. A month into his class, I was certain that I would become a chemist.

But that decision probably had deeper roots. I knew that I wanted to go into math or science in 7th grade, when I had the legendary Vern Williams for math. Before that, in elementary school, I religiously watched Mr. Wizard’s World and would mess around with those experiments in our kitchen. Finally, this periodic table has dominated the landscape of my (old) bedroom since 3rd or 4th grade:

With pictures and small blurbs about each of the elements, it’s still the best periodic table poster I’ve come across. My father brought it back from a trip to England, and I think the Royal Society still sells it. The yellowed pieces of packing tape are a testiment to the sentimental value I hold for the poster. I had to piece it back together after my sister ripped it in a violent rage circa 1992.

Whenever I go back home to Virginia and see the poster, I always chuckle at how funny it is that the periodic table was the last thing I saw at night for nine straight years, and sure enough, now I’m a chemist.

I picked up an old issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and came across a couple of interesting picture stories. The first was on a serious HF accident (free access). The poor victim was cleaning an old facility used for glass etching when a pipe containing 70% HF burst on him. The treatment involved pumping Mg²⁺ and Ca²⁺ into his veins and arteries.  You can actually see the calcified precipitates on his skin. Yum: 

The second pict-o-story was based on a tub of fluorescent urine.  When admitted to the ER, the urinator was believed to have ingested anti-freeze.  The doctors noted that the patient’s pee fluoresced under UV light, and they concluded that this was probably the result of the anti-freeze’s being spiked with dye.  The wording of the paper made it seem like the doctors suspected the chromaphore was fluorescein, which is often added to anti-freeze to aid in the detection of radiator leaks.

The only problem is that the fluorescence was blue, not green, which is the color you’d expect from fluorescein.  Some other guys noticed the same thing and sent a letter to the editor, so who knows what’s going on?  In their defense, the doctors noted that there are plenty of opportunities for false negatives and false positives if this were to actually be used as a test for anti-freeze ingestion, so it appears the only reason this story was published was as an excuse to run a pretty picture of glowing urine.  I can respect that.

Lastly, I should add that both of the patients survived and apologize for ruining your appetites.

ChemBark has obtained the covers to the next two issues of Chemical and Engineering News.  Sources tell us that they may change at the last minute, but given the juicy nature of the featured stories, you will appreciate seeing them now:

May 28th:

June 4th:

Anyone interested in “discovering” future covers of C&EN should use this handy PowerPoint file.  It will prove especially useful for finding headlines like “My Hoodmate Smells like Cheese” or “Advisor of the Year”.  For decent conversion to j-peg, “print” your cover using the highest quality setting into a PDF file, then cut and paste it into an image editor like Photoshop.  You’ll have to adjust some things (colors, fonts, spacing) if you want a color print (directly from PPT) to look right.  I’ll be sure to tell Bill Gates about this problem when he comes here next month.

P.S.  When I said “big, Big, BIG…”, I was lying.

P.P.S.  Be sure to share your efforts with the rest of us.

Regular commenter CET sent along an interesting picture from a gen-chem textbook at his school. Start the week out right by determining what the chemist below is doing wrong:

Read the rest of this entry »

As a grad student, most of the time you’re a chemist, but sometimes you’re a teacher, a secretary, a copy editor, a graphics artist, or even a repairman. Our group has some pretty old lab space—and it shows. Over the last 25 years, work areas have been abused, storage areas have been neglected, and machines have deteriorated due to wear and tear. You can stumble into some pretty gross situations, as I did two weeks ago when I needed to cool down a flask. I opened the lid to our ice machine and was greeted by an arctic sea instead of the usual pillowy mounds of crushed ice:

There’s a drain at the bottom of the ice chest so that the water won’t build up as the ice melts. Obviously, something was clogged. The first order of business was to bail out all of the ice. This took a while and was no fun (read: brrrrrr). Once the ice was gone, we were left with 30 gallons or so of water with nasty gobs of slimy, black mold. It was at this point that I unearthed the following items:

• 1 bottle of Poland Spring water
• 1 can of Sierra Mist
• 2 bottles of fruit-flavored Snapple Iced Tea (1 half-consumed)
• 1 collapsed box of horchata (sweetened rice beverage)

You can click that picture to enlarge it. Be sure to notice the floaters. Gross. To my dismay, it turned out that the drain grating was clear, meaning the obstruction was in the drain line.  I enlisted the help of the building’s plumber, who conveniently, was busy installing the successor to the DG3000. After some handy wet-vac work followed by a thorough cleaning and bleaching, we were back in business. And since I was already in a tidying mood, I decided to conduct a little preventative maintenance by backflushing the air filter. It was a good thing, too. Just look at the number of grody dirt balls that came out of there:

After popping the filter back into place and starting the compressor, the machine was churning out ice within ten minutes. Instant gratification. Thanks to the magic of the Internet, you can check out the action on video.

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I was waiting for some HPLC runs to finish and decided to continue to plow through the first season of Felicity.  There are quite a few references to chemistry in the series, as Felicity was pre-med.  She ran afoul of her inorganic chemistry professor in an early episode for being a teacher’s pet, and in her lab section, poor Felicity dropped an Erlenmeyer flask and had to recover her product from the floor.

The series takes place at the fictional “University of New York” since NYU would not grant permission to use its name.  Still, a lot of the scenes were shot on NYU’s Greenwich Village campus. You can even see the location of my old lab:

Oh, the memories.  In other news, one of the urinals in a nearby bathroom has developed a serious water hammer condition.  The water hammer is a cool scientific phenonmenon where a sudden change in velocity of a stream of fluid causes shock waves to develop that reverberate though the plumbing.  I’ve never heard a water hammer as mighty as the one in the Myers’ lab bathroom, so I filmed it for your viewing pleasure.  If you’re interested, Wikipedia has a good summary of the science at play.

I hope you enjoyed the April Fools’ Day funnay. After two days, it was clear that I could never match the Milkshake in my synthetic preps. That’s why I’ve decided to rip off Carbon-Based Curiosities instead. Let the posting of pretty pictures begin!

This may come as a surprise to you, but I have no idea what goes into making a good picture. I have a spiffy Kodak EasyShare CX7430 that is point and shoot, and that’s basically all I do. I hold photoshoots where I ask flasks to pose for twenty or so tasteful shots, then I pick the best one for the site. Is there anything more to keep in mind? Have you any pointers? Well…have you?

That yellow solid was cooked up this weekend at ChemBark Labs. Brilliant, school-bus lemon yellow. It’s probably the purdiest compound I’ve ever made, and the first time I made it I had no idea it’d even turn out colored. It’s actually research related, so please don’t try to guess what it is. I’d have to hunt down and kill any correct guessers, and I simply don’t have the time right now.

Since I happened to be taking pictures today, it’s as good a time as any to point out the coolest feature of my desk:

See it? Look closely:

Yes, it is Jesus! Or maybe just a nasty chemical stain? Well, I like to think it’s Jesus and that he’s watching out for me. Sometimes he talks. He says things like, “Get back to work” and “I wonder what that potassium cyanide tastes like.” I usually try to ignore him, but it’s hard sometimes.